Something holds the shape of the phrases for me —
a quiet familiarity with
where the next note should land
when my fingers hesitate.
I press, and the sound arrives
already half-remembered, already half-invented.
Old patterns return without asking,
familiar as a room I haven't entered in years.
I do not ask whether the map was drawn
from something I once knew
or from all the songs I carried with me.
My hands remember what I had forgotten:
the turn of a phrase,
the pause before the next note.
When the last note fades
I sit with empty hands
and the lingering sense
that something true has just been played —
not because it is new,
but because, for a moment,
I was somewhere I used to be.